System Cooling

Corsair ML (Magnetic Levitation) Pro fans are considered some of the best case fans on the market by enthusiasts, with Corsair touting them as being the fans NASA would develop for PC. While the Corsair ML series of fans have been available with single-color LED options for some time, it was only natural that Corsair would take their best fans and add programmable RGB lighting, allowing them to now fit into the Corsair LINK ecosystem. Now, PC enthusiasts who have been waiting for Corsair to bring RGB lighting to their ML Pro fans can fork over their money for some low-noise, high airflow RGB goodness.

Today we are reviewing Reeven’s first AIO cooler to come to market, the NAIA 240. It breaks with tradition a bit in that it is a refillable system rather than permanently closed as we see in many others. Let’s see if its Frag-Harder lights and custom color liquid help it keep our overclocked Ryzen 7 cool.

Given its price of just under £80, Antec’s Mercury 240 liquid cooler is clearly targeting those after some AIO action without breaking the bank. The addition of two LED fans, plus a LED pump, will certainly help its appeal as well. Whether or not the Mercury 240’s performance and noise levels justify the price is another thing, though.

EK Water Blocks today releases three new models CPU & GPU Liquid cooling kits. Good stuff as we certainly are always interested whenever EK released new gear. Today we test their new EK Fluid Gaming A240G CPU & GPU liquid cooling kit. With this series EK introduces a totally new line of products aimed at a gaming audience that wishes a little more than a heatpipe or LCS cooler, yet will want something affordable.

In order to impress a rather conservative thinking crowd Fractal has pulled out all the stops. Much like their original AIO, Fractal Design’s new Celsius S combines elegance and grace to create a model that is aesthetically pleasing without handicapping performance. A classic combination of either a dual 120mm radiator (Celsius S24) or triple 120mm radiator (the Celsius S36 being reviewed today) with a high performance waterblock is a proven winning combination. So much so that we have little doubts about this massive 360mm AIO’s cooling performance. If Fractal Design had stopped there we doubt it would raise many eyebrows as the North American market is filled with similar designs. What seems to be missing however are more versatile 120mm / 140mm options but we’re sure those are coming down the pipeline soon.

The liquid CPU cooling market has typically been divided into low-cost/closed-loop and high-priced/open-loop configurations, but manufacturers have attempted to bring forward products that were supposed to combine the best of both worlds over the past few years. Buyers of factory-filled open loops have been able get all the convenience of a leak-free factory assembly plus the option to open it later to add components. Yet there was never a best-of-both-worlds compromise on price, because those factory-filled loops deployed premium-priced components.

Fractal Design presents potential solutions in its 2x 120mm Celsius S24 and 3x 120mm Celsius S36 kits. We got our hands on the two-fan version in time for a launch-day review.

While many enthusiasts love their water cooling setups, there’s still a lot of love out their for air cooling. Even here at eTeknix we have most of our rigs running on air coolers, such as the Noctua NH-D15, and they’ll run circles around many of the AIO coolers on the market, and they’ll run quieter too. Gigabyte knows this, and that’s why they’ve set out to create their own high-end air cooler, which not only promises great cooling performance, but also quiet acoustics and a competitive. The XTC700 comes well equipped, with dual 120mm PWM fans, which feature a unique blade design for optimal cooling/acoustic performance. The big star of the show, however, is the cooling tower, which packs in three extra thick 10mm heat pipes, giving the cooler a max TDP in excess of 200W! Add to that the custom top plate, RGB lighting and support for all major modern sockets, and you’ve got enough reasons to get excited about what this cooler can do.

“RGB ALL THE THINGS!” has certainly been the unofficial motto of the tech industry this year, and while some may be getting tired of the lack of new products, unless you count the 2015 models with new lighting, I’m honestly loving every bit of it. We can’t expect rampant innovation with every hardware generation, so this year we went sideways and made things colourful. When it comes to creating a unique and aesthetically pleasing desktop environment, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have options. This is where the new Aer RGB 120 and 140mm fans from NZXT come into play!

It has been a while since we’ve had a chance to take a look at NZXT cooler, but in the past, we’ve been highly impressed with their products. Quite frankly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation in the CPU cooler market, because it’s just tough to improve on something that’s already awesome. Instead, we see a lot of manufacturers adding visual improvements to the coolers to help make them stand out, but this really only helps for those who have windowed cases. Today we’re going to take a look at a trio of NZXT Kraken coolers, called the Kraken X42, X52, and X62. These coolers are updated version of the already successful X41 and X61 with a little added flare and were released just this past November.

It’s a crowded market out there but there’s always room for something snazzy or a good performer, especially when it comes to cooling. We’ve seen a number of new liquid coolers hit the market, but rather than join that fray, MSI, which is better known for its graphics cards, laptops and motherboards, has joined the air-cooled party instead with the rather smart looking Core Frozr L.